Bacon, Deluze and Imperceptible Forces

Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

This paper addresses the complex relation between Francis Bacon and Giles Deleuze, who wrote one of the most perceptive and sympathetic books on Bacon's painting, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze did not really write on Bacon so much as with him on a question that intrigued both of them, the possibilities we might unearth for perceiving or understanding forces that are normally imperceptible, forces of magnetism, gravity, causality and chance, forces of aging and disintegration. I will explore what this understanding of forces involves.